


Attack of the Phantom Hairdresser

by janet_mayfire



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Crack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-04
Updated: 2019-06-04
Packaged: 2020-04-07 16:41:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19088974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/janet_mayfire/pseuds/janet_mayfire
Summary: A little piece of harmless nonsense that I wrote many, many years ago.





	Attack of the Phantom Hairdresser

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this many, many years ago. I'm posting it here now in honour of Paul Darrow's death.

Vila was already nursing a cup of coffee when Dayna stalked in, clearly looking for somebody to attack. She made a beeline for the coffee pot, and was pouring milk into her mug when Tarrant appeared, looking relaxed and cheerful. Avon, of course, had not bothered to spend more than a couple of hours in bed and was already in Xenon Base’s laboratory with Orac, where they’d been for most of the night. Vila had no idea what they were working on, and didn’t particularly care, either. There was no point asking, since Avon would not tell them his goals unless pressed, and Vila didn’t care enough to press.

“Sleep well?” Tarrant asked Dayna courteously.

“You should know that already,” she retorted, “given that you crept into my room sometime during the night and gave me a head massage.”

Tarrant looked bewildered, and Vila smirked. “You’d better be careful, Tarrant,” Vila said. “If she decides she’s not interested, she’ll probably say it with percussion bombs.”

“Head massage?” Tarrant said. “What are you talking about? Why on earth would I go creeping uninvited into your bedroom in the middle of the night? I’m not stupid, you know.”

Dayna clearly relaxed at the sound of his confusion. “No, you’re not nearly stupid enough,” she replied. “Pity, really.”

“I didn’t think you’d like that sort of thing!” Tarrant protested.

“I never said that,” Dayna said. “It was actually a very good head massage. I slept very well after it.”

Tarrant started to look trapped. Vila didn’t blame him.

“Why did you think it was me?” he asked finally.

“When I looked around, I saw somebody of about your height and shape running away.”

Tarrant frowned. “Well, I did go to the kitchen in the night for some water. I thought I saw something move in the shadows near your room, and I ran after it.”

“Was anything there?” Vila asked, pre-empting Dayna.

Tarrant shook his head. “Nothing was out of place. I must have imagined it.”

“Well, if it wasn’t you, who was it?” Dayna asked, raising an eyebrow. “It wasn’t Vila – he knows what I’d do to him if I caught him in my room, and it’d hardly be Avon.”

She was right about that, Vila thought morosely. She’d caught him snooping around her quarters once, and he’d barely escaped with his life.

“How can you be certain it wasn’t Avon?” Soolin asked from the doorway, raising an eyebrow.

She was immaculately coiffed, as usual – a complete contrast to Tarrant, whose hair was defying its usual standards of messy curliness for an even scruffier than normal look. Dayna, of course, looked she didn’t know what a comb was for. Not that a hairstyle as short as hers could ever be anything but neat, Vila decided.

“Avon?” Dayna asked sceptically. “I hardly think he’d know one end of a curling tong from another, let alone how to give a good head massage. Tarrant, on the other hand…”

Soolin smirked. Vila glanced over at Tarrant, but he merely looked confused.

“Dayna’s right, Soolin,” Vila agreed. “Avon’s not what I’d call prime masseur material. You, on the other hand, might be pretty good at it. I’d love a good head massage right now.”

“I bet you would,” Soolin replied, “given how much it must hurt, after your activities last night.”

“My head is fine, thank you very much,” Vila protested.

Soolin grinned and sashayed over to the kitchen area, where she made herself a cup of coffee. Soolin, Vila had decided some time ago, was physically incapable of simply walking anywhere. Wherever she moved, however she moved, those fabulous hips of hers stole the limelight.

She was just settling gracefully into a comfortable chair when the door slid open again, and Avon stalked in, carrying Orac and with a head of hair that roughly doubled his height.

‘How does he manage to walk like that when he’s carrying Orac?’ Vila wondered irrelevantly while he attempted to reset his first impression of Avon for the day into something saner. ‘Orac’s heavy. And black leather doesn’t do much for grace of movement.’

Vaguely, he was aware that his jaw had dropped. That Dayna was spilling coffee all over herself. That Tarrant was beginning to giggle. That Soolin’s eyebrows had gone up.

Avon’s hair was big.

Bouffant.

As though he’s spent most of the night standing in front of the mirror persuading it to be that way.

It looked fantastic.

“That’s enough from you,” Avon snarled, putting Orac down on the bench.

“I was merely pointing out that the quantity of the chemical which has so mysteriously embedded itself in your hair is, when combined with the quantity of the same chemical which may be found in Soolin’s hair, large enough to power this base for two full hours.”

“Well, don’t,” Avon growled, and pulled out Orac’s key. He put the key on the edge of Orac’s case, and looked around at them, his scowl deepening. Daring them to say something. Not that anybody was capable of saying anything at that moment. In the silence, Avon went and made himself a cup of coffee.

They were, with the exception of a silently giggling Soolin, staring at him with their mouths open. His hair had been swept back off his face and, judging by his conversation with Orac, fixed in place with extensive quantities of hair product. It gleamed under the artificial lights. Dayna’s fingers were twitching, and Vila suspected that she wanted to run her hands through Avon’s carefully coiffed hair. Why, Vila wondered, doesn’t she ever want to run her hands through my hair?

“Ah,” said Tarrant. “Now we know what you do with your time instead of sleeping.”

With a wordless growl, Avon stalked out of the room.

“No way,” Dayna said. “No way was it Avon in my room last night.” She looked around at the others. “Not that I would have minded if it was him.”

Soolin cracked up completely. “Likewise,” she sputtered.

“Well?” Tarrant asked her, finally deciding that she was the person most likely to have an answer to the mystery of Avon’s hair.

Soolin pulled herself together. “It is one of the biggest mysteries of this base,” she told them, unable to completely stop herself from giggling. “I don’t do my own hair, you know,” she added. “I wake up in the morning, and this is what it looks like.”

“You mean, somebody creeps about the base in the middle of the night, giving people head massages and doing their hair?” Dayna asked incredulously.

Soolin nodded. “At first I thought it was Dorian, but he said he had nothing to do with it.”

“Are you seriously telling me that this base has a Phantom Hairdresser?” Vila demanded. Soolin nodded again. “Why didn’t he do me or Tarrant, then?”

“Perhaps he doesn’t like either of you,” Dayna suggested with a smirk.

“Look,” said Tarrant, “We can’t have a mysterious person creeping about the base with full access to our rooms and our persons. Who knows what he might do?”

“Tarrant’s right,” Dayna conceded reluctantly. “We’re going to have to search the base.”

Vila rolled his eyes and got up. He went over to Orac and put his key in. “Orac, can you conduct a scan of this base?”

“Certainly I can,” Orac replied. “To what purpose?”

“There’s somebody here who is creeping about in the middle of the night doing people’s hair. So we want to know if there’s anybody else here.”

“Good thinking,” Dayna said. Vila was pleased to notice that she was looking a little impressed.

“Oh, very well,” Orac said, and fell silent for a moment. A couple of seconds later, he said “There is nobody on this base apart from Avon and the four of you.”

“They mustn’t live inside the base, then,” Tarrant surmised. “Do you want to conduct a search of the surrounding area?”

“What’s the weather like outside?” Vila asked.

“It’s raining,” Soolin told him.

“Well, why don’t we just keep an eye on the door? Monitor who goes in and out tonight.”

“What’s the matter?” Dayna teased. “Don’t you like getting wet?”

Vila bristled. “I don’t mind a hot shower or a bath every day, but I draw the line at rain. Rain’s cold!”

“Poor, pampered little dome dweller,” Dayna replied, rolling her eyes.

“I don’t want to get wet either,” Tarrant said.

“Awww, poor baby doesn’t want his hair to go all frizzy!”

“It took me three hours to get it to settle down last time,” he protested.

“I don’t like going out in the rain either,” Soolin said quickly, before the argument could escalate. “And I didn’t grow up in a dome.”

“Oh, all right,” Dayna said with a sigh. “But I’m going to go and have a look anyway. I’m getting sick and tired of sitting around all day.”

“It’s not good for your figure, either,” Vila teased, and ducked out of the way as Dayna lunged at him. “See? You’re getting slow.”

Dayna headed for the door. “I’ll be back later,” she said. “Avon would be annoyed with me if I killed Vila.”

“More’s the pity,” Tarrant agreed with his most charming smile.

Vila grinned, and went to check the footage from the security cameras for intruders, and to upgrade the monitoring system to include scanning for heat signatures.

The next morning, they discovered that the cameras had been disabled during the night. And that the Phantom Hairdresser had permed Avon’s hair in retaliation.


End file.
